F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Historical Fiction and the Black Atlantic Archive

This week in preparation for class we reviewed sources on fashion, materiality, and the Black Atlantic archive, but additionally we read Sadiya Hartman's essay "Venus in Two Acts" in which she relies on a narrative form of constructing history that employs literary techniques, speculation, and historical knowledge to render a fuller picture of the life of a young enslaved African girl. Her beautiful prose proves that historiography is fundamentally an interpretive and narrative enterprise. As we also well know, an emphasis on the materiality of the archive can only provide so much information, especially given that the history of capitalism heavily influences the reality and survivability of material documents and artifacts. With that in mind, I have complied a small list of historical fiction works I could think of that help me think of the Black Atlantic living through literary constructions of history. 

US:
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Toni Morrison, Paradise
Barbara Chase-Ribboud, Sally Hemmings
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Mat Johnson, Pym
Sadiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Sadiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts
Nate Parker, Birth of a Nation (2016)
Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo
 
Caribbean:
Marie Chauvet, Dance on the Volcano
Maryse Conde, I, Tituba
CLR James, Black Jacobins
Marlon James, Book of Night Women

UK:
Bernadine Evaristso, Blonde Roots

Many of these works imagine ways in which the history of the African diaspora lives or collides with history in the present moment. Kindred is a great example of the way in which time collapses across generations. 

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